


my soul, my heart (pull everything apart)

by meridies



Series: september prompt week [4]
Category: Minecraft (Video Game), Video Blogging RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Fluff, Immortality, Light Angst, M/M, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-24
Updated: 2020-09-24
Packaged: 2021-03-08 00:47:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26636830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meridies/pseuds/meridies
Summary: Dream thinks he would fall in love with him again, over and over, a million times in a million different ways and in a million different timelines. He thinks that he will never run out of ways to love George.or, Dream is immortal, George is a time traveler, and together they learn to appreciate the life they've been given.
Relationships: Clay | Dream/GeorgeNotFound (Video Blogging RPF)
Series: september prompt week [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1934206
Comments: 77
Kudos: 2113





	my soul, my heart (pull everything apart)

**Author's Note:**

> prompt for day 4 is soulmates/song lyrics and i completely ignored the song lyrics. enjoy!!
> 
> this fic now has a translation in russian, which can be found [here.](https://ficbook.net/readfic/9982985)

It has been three thousand years and Dream is still living, breathing, walking. 

This is what he thinks when he sits on top of the tallest building in New York City and watches the cars pass by in the distance. Below him people are as small as ants. Above him, nothing but sky. 

The pavement swims in his vision. From this height, a fall would be fatal. 

“You’ve been up here a while,” George comments. Dream barely notices him arrive, and that unsettles him. But he’s known George for longer than he can imagine, back when time was barely a concept and there were no laws to society. Back when Dream’s sole purpose had been to live the life he had been given.

Back, before he knew there was no end in sight.

Dream laughs. “A while.” 

“Well,” George amends, “For me.” 

“What year is it?” 

“2014.”

“Mm.”

There’s silence. 

George moves closer to him. “Are you alright?” 

Dream closes his eyes and thinks of moonlight shining off the Seine and words spoken in hushed French, thinks about sunlight creeping through stained glass panels of a cathedral. He opens his eyes, and for a moment sees nothing but stars. 

“Fine,” he says. George watches him curiously for a moment, before nodding. Whatever he sees in Dream, it is enough. 

“Tell me about your day,” George says. 

“What is there to say?”

George hums, lets his legs dangle off the building. “Anything. Everything.”

“I passed a taxi today that ran a red light.”

“Interesting.”

“Someone dropped their coffee at a bus station.”

“Hm.”

It’s become somewhat of a routine for them. Dream, who has lived every single day in fluid silence, barely remembers the details. He spends weeks in a fugue. He spends days thinking and sitting and doing nothing. George is the one to pull him out when Dream sinks too deep.

“Any other details?”

“There was an airplane that flew overhead,” Dream recalls. It had flown directly past the sun. 

George nods, and they sit in silence. Dream watches a cloud drift past the sky and tries to imprint the shape of it into his mind, the way it dissolves into mist after a few minutes.

“Do you want to hear about my day?” George offers.

“If you want to share.”

George clears his throat and begins speaking.

He has this wonderful way of speaking. The way the vowels are rounded and the consonants slip from his mouth. Sometimes they drop off the ends of the words and Dream doesn’t even bother listening to the content, just the way his voice sounds. George talks and talks and talks, and he talks himself hoarse about the most minute things, the barest details, down to the spots of a red ladybug from a summer field to the dull pink crayon in a child’s coloring box. He spares no detail.

Dream thinks that he loves him for it. 

* * *

He is twenty when he learns.

Dream lets the water run pale over his hands until they become blue. Veins struggle to the surface, and icy shock ripples over his palms. With a vague, curious thought, he removes them from the river. 

The sunlight is warm against chilly skin, and Dream presses his hands against his stomach. He turns, begins making his way on the trodden path back to his home, and stops.

Blue eyes watch him. Dream freezes, and stares at the interloper with hostility.

“Hello,” the other man says, and even though he speaks a language Dream neither knows nor understands, he can tell exactly what words are being spoken to him. 

“Hi,” Dream says cautiously. 

“Have you met me before?”

“No,” Dream responds. He isn’t entirely sure what to do. He’s never seen this man before in his life. 

“How old are you?”

Dream thinks. 

From the future, Dream knows that he was twenty one years old when George visited him for the first time, but at that point in humanity, there was no concept of years or age or life. It simply happened and then passed. 

“I don’t know,” Dream says truthfully, and the man nods.

“I’m George,” he says. 

It isn’t a name Dream recognizes, but it suits him.

“I’m Dream,” he introduces himself, and the man nods like he already knows who Dream is.

Then he asks, “Do you know?”

Know what?

“You don’t,” George says in realization. 

“What don’t I know?” Dream says, and George glances to the side shiftily, seemingly torn between two decisions.

Finally, he says, “There isn’t an easy way to break it to you, but you’re immortal.”

It’s possibly the bluntest way he could have said it. 

But the word hasn’t come into Dream’s vocabulary yet. So he asks George, and George explains it to him.

_Immortal. Living forever. Never dying nor decaying._

“Oh,” Dream says, and sits down. He looks at his hands, which have faded back to pink from the cold water. Blood runs underneath them, but Dream doesn’t even recognize that. “Oh.”

“I know it’s hard to believe,” George says quietly, and takes one of Dream’s hands in his. His hand is warm. Dream barely feels the touch.

“Hard to believe,” Dream repeats. “You think?”

“But I’ll be here for you,” George says. “I’m— I’m like you. But different. But I’ll be with you until the end. I promise.”

Dream doesn’t know what George’s promises are worth, but he can tell that nothing George has said ever in his life will be as truthful as that. 

He turns to go, and Dream can see the edges of George’s figure begin to ripple in and out, fading away, like a badly smeared drawing, and before he flickers out, Dream asks, almost desperately, “How long?”

George doesn’t respond.

“How long until it ends?”

George turns, sadly, and says, “It never does. Not that I know of.”

He vanishes.

Dream looks at his hands again. He squeezes them tight, and looks at the curved, half crescent marks that his nails have made.

He thinks about his mother, and how her hands are wrinkled and aged from a lifetime of use, how they show every wear and tear of her body like a map.

His hands will never look like that.

Dream sits back, looks at the sky, and tries to remember how to breathe. 

* * *

It is 1976 and Dream is high. 

The blunt in his hand drifts smoke into the air and Dream breathes it in deeply, holding it in his lungs as long as possible. He lets the smoke work its way through his body and takes another hit. The sky is a hazy, soft blue and the clouds form into different shapes before his eyes. Dream takes a third hit and passes the blunt on.

“Were you ever not high in the seventies?” an amused voice asks to his side. Dream recognizes it, and chooses to ignore it. He lets himself fall down to the ground and closes his eyes. The grass is tickly under his palms, and he sits in silence for a few minutes. Muted laughter reaches him, Dream doesn’t participate. 

He opens his eyes again when the blunt circles back to him, burnt down to the filter. Dream pushes himself up and offers it to the man next to him.

“No,” George says. “I’m good.” 

Dream shrugs and ashes the blunt into the ground. “Suit yourself.” 

He doesn’t leave, but instead lays down next to Dream. Dream tolerates it for a moment, and then says, “Why are you here?”

“Am I not allowed to have fun?” 

“Shh,” Dream says, waving a hand. “You’re ruining the high.” 

George huffs. “You’re always high this decade. Does that change?”

“How would I know?” says Dream lazily. “You’re the one with all the answers.” 

George says nothing, for so long that Dream thinks he has dissolved again. Dream lolls his head to the side to see, but the man is still there. 

“Dream,” George says, “This day is worth living.” 

Dream watches the sun sink lower and lower, and thinks about how nothing even matters anymore. 

“Tell whichever version of me you see next that I say hello.”

George nods his head in the corner of Dream’s vision, stands up, and leaves.

* * *

It is 44 B.C.E. and Dream is listening to the Senate speak in the Curia of Pompey, and wondering when the day will turn into something memorable, when he looks over to the man across the courtyard. The sun rises off the ground, the man’s face rippling in the heat, and Dream beckons him over. 

“George,” Dream greets, when he reaches him. “I feel like I just saw you yesterday.”

George smiles, and says, “Hello from 1976.” 

Dream lets the barest hint of a smile cross his face. “1976? I live that long?” 

“Longer,” George corrects. “Pay attention, now. Things are about to get interesting.”

The man leaves, and Julius Caesar gets stabbed, and he turns, gasping to Brutus, “ _You too, child?”_

Dream stands up and leaves. He lives to 1976, whatever time that may be. As far as he knows, there is no end in sight.

* * *

It is 1991 and Dream is, unfortunately, not high. Instead he’s in Berlin, because nothing matters anymore. 

“Watching the wall fall?” someone says. Dream knows who it is instantly, without having to turn his head. 

“I’ve got nowhere better to be,” he says. 

“History in the making,” George says dryly. From a mere hundred feet away, both Dream and George are watching someone take a sledgehammer to concrete, smashing and cracking and breaking until the first slab falls. Dream thinks about all the other times he’s seen walls collapse on themselves, and marks this one away as a memory to come back to.

“Do you think this will make it into the history books?” Dream asks.

“I don’t think I’m supposed to tell you,” George says, “But yes, it does.” 

“Do I make it into the history books?”

This time, George smiles. “I think that would be revealing the future.”

Dream sighs. “I suppose so.”

“Well,” George says, and puts his hands in his pockets, “I hope that today is memorable enough for you to remember it.”

Dream nods again.

When he glances over, George is gone. 

* * *

It is 48 B.C.E. and Dream is sprinting, faster than his feet can carry him, through a massive library stretching for eons. He can hear the creaking masts of the ships as they sway and fall around, loud, crashing booms that echo through the halls. Things are turning to ash behind him; fire licks through the books almost faster than Dream can run away. The fire pulses and swallows his life whole as he knows it. 

The smoke overtakes him, and for a moment, Dream can’t breath. The only thing he sees is red. There’s no exit, no way out, no way to escape.

The next thing he knows, he is on a grassy slope, earth soft and springy beneath his body, and sitting beside him is George, twisting his fingers anxiously, eyebrows tight and knit together. No muscle in his body is relaxed.

Dream coughs, clears his throat, and pushes himself to his feet.

“Dream,” George says, and nearly bowls him over in a hug, “You’re alive, _you’re alive!”_

“I’m always alive,” Dream says, and winces at how rough his voice is from the smoke. He checks his fingers for the burns that he is sure should be there, but finds only smooth, unmarred skin. There’s no mark that the fire even happened. 

“Did it burn?” he whispers, and the memories come back, piling on top of one another, tumultuous and terrible and fierce. “Is it gone?”

George turns away, doesn’t say anything, and Dream swallows hard.

He looks over and accuses, “You knew.”

George nods.

“You knew that Caesar would burn the library to the ground?” Dream demands. “You knew all along?”

George, miserably, nods.

Dream tries to be angry, he tries so much, tries to bring the bubbling rage to the surface, but it fades away quicker than he can grasp at the hems of it. Instead, he tucks his knees to his chest, looks at the building that sways like a skeleton, burnt to its bones, barely able to stand. 

Everything is _gone._ Burnt to ashes, like it never existed in the first place. All that wonderful, incredible knowledge lost forever. 

Everything he loves. Everything he cares about. 

He looks over at George and amends, _almost everything._

So he says, “Never tell me what happens." His voice is hoarse. 

George’s fingers are streaked with soot, likely from where he dragged Dream out into freedom. “In the future?”

“Wherever you come from,” Dream says. “I never want to know.” 

George pulls his knees to his chest, mimics Dream’s posture, and looks out to the sea.

The navy is there, some ships burnt, some still standing proud and tall. Abruptly Dream is aware of just how fragile everything is. 

And the reality strikes him all at once: nothing will last.

Everything will fade. Everything will die.

And he will be the only one to watch it all happen, always alone. 

“I’m going to go,” Dream says, and stumbles to his feet, “I’m leaving.”

“Where?”

“Anywhere but here,” Dream says. He can’t bear to look at it one moment longer. “Anywhere but here.”

* * *

It is 1925 and Dream is neck deep in a New York City bar, drinking his way out of trouble. 

“Isn’t this prohibition?” George says, when he shimmers into existence at Dream's side.

Dream gestures widely with one arm at the revelry. “Does it look like we care?”

George concedes the point with a nod of his head. “You’re drunk.”

Dream is drunk. Drunk enough to frown when George pushes his eighth— ninth?— shot out of the way. 

He frowns. “That was mine.”

“You need to drink some water,” George says firmly, and grips one hand around Dream’s arm and pulls him out of the chair. “You really are drunk, huh?”

“Why are we leaving?” His head spins more now that he’s standing, wobbling on two feet, and the entire world feels like it's moving in circles around him. “Wait, why did we leave?”

“We’re going back to your place,” George mutters, and continues leading Dream down the sidewalk. His head is fuzzy, but the cool night air has brought him back into shocking awareness. 

“But I want to go back.”

“My god,” George huffs, “You’re like a baby.” 

Sullenly: “No, I’m not.”

George leads them on a straight, direct line back to Dream’s apartment, even though Dream isn’t entirely sure where his apartment is himself. He supposes it’s good that George has been here so often that he knows where to take him. 

“I don’t know if I should tell you this,” George says, fishing Dream’s keys from his pocket and ushering him inside. “But alcohol won’t be illegal for much longer.”

“Good,” Dream says, in drunken satisfaction, “It better not.”

George doesn’t look pleased, but he crosses to the tiny kitchenette and pours Dream a glass of water. Then he sits at the counter and waits for Dream to drink it all, which Dream does, albeit slowly. 

After a too long moment of silence, George says, “Please don’t do this to yourself.” 

Dream doesn’t understand. “What?”

“Don’t throw things away,” George says. “Please don’t.”

“I’m not throwing anything away,” Dream says. “What the hell are you talking about?” 

“I don’t want to see you destroy yourself,” George says faintly. “I’ve seen you like this before, I know how it goes. There are better ways to go than numbing everything.”

“I’m not numbing anything.”

“Really?” George says. Uncharacteristically harsh. He pinches the skin on Dream’s wrist sharply. “What are you doing, then?”

Dream opens his mouth to say something, to say anything, but no words emerge. 

George sighs, turns away, paces the floor in rapid, even circles. He doesn’t say anything for a while. Dream looks down at the glass of water in his hands and tries, through a drunken, foggy mind, to understand why George is so upset. 

“I care about you,” George answers, and Dream didn’t realize that he had said it out loud, “And I love you too much to see you try and escape like this.” 

“It’s easy for you to say,” Dream says, and he feels his temper threaten to spill, “You don’t understand what it’s like.”

“Don’t I?” His eyes are glassy in the darkness, hardened over like obsidian. “Do you think every other person spends half of their life in a different time like me?”

“You have no idea what it’s like for me,” Dream hisses, and he swipes a hand through the air angrily, and he knows that the alcohol is making him irrational, emotional, “There’s nowhere to go, everyone always leaves, nothing lasts—”

“You have me,” George says, and when Dream doesn’t listen, says it louder, “You have me!”

“You’re going to leave too!” Dream shouts.

George takes a step back.

“You’re not immortal,” Dream says. “You’re going to die at some point. Where does that leave me?” 

George takes another step back. He doesn’t take his eyes off of Dream, and with a horrifying swoop in his stomach, Dream realizes that the edges of him are blurring in and out, fading away. The surefire sign that George’s time in Dream’s timeline is running out.

“I’m always going to be here,” George says.

Dream, awfully, cannot believe him.

“Go away,” he whispers. 

There’s the lightest touch on his shoulder, and the faintest press of lips to cheek. 

When Dream turns, George has vanished. 

* * *

He meets George in his own timeline.

There isn’t a moment when he realizes it. There’s only a low understanding; they’ve intersected. From now until George leaves, there isn’t any time traveling. Because for now, this is George’s present.

Dream doesn’t understand what’s tied the two of them together, why they’re glued to each other by the hip regardless of time or era or age. Whenever George time travels, he always ends up next to Dream, no matter what. And barely a day passes before Dream sees George again; his visits only last around half an hour, at most, but Dream sees him often. 

They bump into each other in a coffee shop. Of all places.

“It’s you,” George says, eyes wide. 

“I know it’s me,” Dream says, “Why are you so surprised?” 

George looks around, takes him by the shirtsleeve, and drags him outside where it’s busier and there are less chances for people to overhear them. “I’m not time traveling.”

“What?”

“You’re in _my_ timeline,” George says. “2019. You’ve made it.”

“Your timeline,” Dream says, stunned. 

For some reason, he had assumed George would be from a far more future time. He hadn’t guessed a date or a year, but from the entire time he’s known George, George has always been so modern, so advanced. He knows that’s a side effect of being immortal, though; everything is futuristic to him.

“My timeline,” George agrees. 

“How old are you now?”

“Twenty three,” George says. 

“College?”

“Just graduated,” George says, “I’m taking a year in between graduate school.”

It’s the barest of conversations. They haven’t had a conversation like that in so many years— at least for Dream. He supposes that it’s just the novelty of it. 

“Do you want to come back to my place?” George blurts. “I have an apartment a few miles north of here, we can take the train back.” 

Dream nods, and George takes him by the hand and tugs him along. Both of them forget to pick up their drinks, which are left forgotten on a table in the back.

Along the way, George can’t stop talking. The words flow out of him all at once, like a cup under a gushing waterfall, and he points out everything in his hometown from the small florist’s shop down a small alley to the Neapolitan pizza place that the locals love to the elderly neighbors who water the rosebush outside their apartment daily. He shows Dream the quiet bookstore that sells antiquities and the chain sandwich place that he goes to for lunches at work. George talks and talks and talks until he shows Dream into his apartment, until the sun has dipped low in the sky and the stars have begun to shine. 

“I’ve got to go,” Dream says, and both he and George look regretful at that.

“Come and visit me tomorrow,” George says. “Please.”

Dream tries, and fails, to bite back a smile at George’s eagerness. “If you really want me to.”

“I do,” George says, “I really, really do.” 

He leaves with the promise to return.

It’s the first time Dream has ever had a place to return to.

* * *

It is 1997 and Dream is, somehow, in college again. 

It’s funny timing because in his great, grand lifespan Dream has read the Code of Hammurabi, studied at the library of Alexandria, attended the signing of the Magna Carta, sat through Marie Antoinette’s private tutoring, and took the first class offered at Oxford University. Yet here he is, being lectured to in an English class, writing an essay on a book whose author he had known. 

The author’s body crumbled to dust anyway. Like everyone else’s had, and does, and will. 

Dream looks at his hands. They are smooth, unblemished, unmarked, like nothing can touch them. Dream looks at the teacher, his greying hair, the spectacles that perch on his nose. He looks at the book in his hand, thinks about a man who told him _you live, and that is the rarest thing in the world. I am only existing, and that is all I ever will do._

Time slips through his hands in an endless spool, on and on and on, ribbons of inevitability that drag behind him in trains. 

“Thinking again?” George asks, when class ends. 

“All I do,” Dream responds. 

“About what?” 

“What time were you just in?” Dream says, neatly dodging the question. 

“We were in Greece,” George says. “Watching the sunset from Athens.”

Dream vaguely remembers that. Something with a glass of wine, a taste of saltwater, the soft spoken words of George next to him. The details are somewhat fuzzy. 

“I don’t remember,” he admits. “Was there anything important that happened?”

George hums, thinks, says, “It was peaceful. That’s what I remember.”

Dream nods. 

_Peaceful,_ he thinks.

Yet another word to describe how George makes him feel. 

* * *

It is 2020 and Dream watches the moon track a path across the sky, on and on. 

He blinks and he is in Gaza, Ethiopia, Siberia, Santiago, the Mesopotamia Valley, and the moon looks down on him the same. 

“Funny to find you here,” George says lightly. Dream hears him take a seat next to him, sitting cross-legged on the grass. Dream stretches out his legs and closes his eyes. 

“Funny to see you here, too,” Dream responds, and enjoys the blessed few moments of silence where it’s only him and George. 

“What time are you thinking about?”

George has always been able to read Dream too well.

“You have that look on your face.” Lightly, George’s thumb comes to Dream’s lower lip and pulls on it for a moment, then lets it go, and Dream hears his small laugh at the noise it makes. “I can tell when you’re thinking about the past.” 

“I’m not thinking of a specific time,” Dream says, and fights to keep the smile off his face so George can pull at his lower lip again. “Just all the times I’ve seen the moon.”

“Do you remember when they first put someone on the moon?”

“I do,” Dream says, and opens his eyes to see the moon, full and yellow, right above him. “I didn’t believe it was real at first.”

“A lot of people didn’t,” George says. “I think the general consensus is that it is true.” 

“What do you think?”

“I wasn’t there the day it happened,” George says. “But I remember seeing you the day after and hearing about it.” 

“What happens when you travel?” Dream asks. They’ve talked about it, every so often, but not in detail. 

“I’m not sure,” George says thoughtfully. “I haven’t told anyone. And I always come back at the exact moment I left.” He gives Dream a small smile. “In a way, I’ve lived almost as long as you.” 

“How does it feel knowing that you get to have an end?”

“The same as it feels knowing that you don’t.”

Dream pushes himself up so he’s sitting, facing George. The moonlight is nearly bright enough to cast a shadow. He can see George clearly in the dark. 

“We match each other,” Dream says eventually. 

“I guess the universe did one good thing after all.”. 

He looks at George, not fading out at all, and remembers that this is where their timelines intersect perfectly; they’re with each other. 

“If I’m going to live forever,” Dream says, his throat tight, “At least I spent some of it with you.” 

George looks at him, and Dream thinks that he would make the entire world vanish to keep George at his side.

George says, quietly, “You deserve so much more than what this world has given you.”

“Don’t say that.”

“It’s true,” George says. “I’ve never said anything more true in my life.” 

“You are unbearable.”

“I’m so glad you exist.”

“Shut up,” Dream whispers, “Shut up, shut up, shut up,” and then kisses him.

Dream kisses George fervently, gloriously, like nothing exists except for the press of lips to lips, like his world stops and starts with George’s mouth on his. He kisses him like George is fire, warmer than anything Dream has experienced before, and George blooms underneath him. 

“I love you,” George whispers, and Dream feels his smile against his skin, imprinting itself into his memory.

“I love you too,” Dream says, and knows that nothing in the world could be more true. 

* * *

Dream wakes up to the sunlight spilling through the window and to his bones aching. 

His stomach hollows itself out. A bruise from the day before had stayed on his body. His body shows signs of being worn out, of being truly alive. He can feel the slight strain in his muscles from walking yesterday, the signs that a body is _alive._

Carefully, he moves each of his fingers, then pinches himself on the soft skin of his inner forearm. The pain stings through him, grounding him firmly, and Dream glances at the room, at the scuffed wallpaper in the corner, the rumpled sheets of the bed, the loose, stretched out sleepshirt that technically belongs to George, the paned window in the corner with the lock that doesn’t work, the way George’s hair is splayed over the pillow in a mess of dark brown. 

“I’m aging,” he whispers, stunned, because he can feel it. He doesn’t need to see himself to know. 

He’s aging, he’s breathing, he’s moving, he’s _alive—_ he’s _alive—_

There’s a wild, riotous, joyous feeling surging to the forefront of his chest, and Dream lets it fill him up with light, from the inside out. He feels almost triumphant. He feels like he could eat the world raw. He feels unstoppable.

For a moment, he wants to wake up George.

Then he looks at him, and the riot in his chest fades into something much softer, much lighter, something tender and still.

He doesn’t wake up George. 

Instead, he curls back into bed, right next to the warmth of George’s body, tries to soak up as much heat as possible, and resolves to tell George when he wakes up on his own. 

* * *

Two years later, Dream wakes up in the middle of the night and looks at the time. 

There’s silence coming from outside, only the faint sounds of crickets chirping from the backyard. Dream stretches, carefully frees himself from George’s loose, sleepy grasp on him, and swings his legs off the side of the bed. The carpeted floor is cool beneath his feet, and Dream aches and remembers, yet again, that his body ages now, and he needs to be careful how he sleeps, because the crick in his neck won’t fade instantly now. 

The timer on the microwave blinks and tells Dream that it’s nearly three in the morning, and he should be going back to sleep. Instead of listening to that, Dream turns the lights on to the dimmest settings, goes about heating up water on the stove, and drops a tea packet in. There’s a jar of honey that he sets to the side, and cream comes from the fridge. When the water is just about to boil, Dream pours himself a mug, curls onto the sofa with it, and takes a slow, slow sip. 

He still does this, sometimes. Loses track of the time. Forgets to savor every moment. Forgets that things matter, now, that he has a life to be living. So he cherishes the little things. The warmth spreading through his body. Loose sweatpants, tucked over the soles of his feet when he pulls them up onto the sofa. The feel of the soft fabric of the cushions against his skin.

He’s busy remembering every detail when George finds him.

Dream blinks up at him, and realizes that this isn’t his George, not the present timeline.

This is a much younger George, a George who likely doesn’t know that—

“You’re older,” the younger George says, almost stunned, “How are you _older?”_

Dream places his mug on a side table, gestures for George to sit, and he does, though he can’t keep the shell-shocked expression off his face.

“When did you last see me?” Dream asks. 

George thinks. “You were in Paris,” he says eventually. “We walked along the Seine. It was 1930.”

Ah. Dream takes a moment to reorient himself with that timeline.

“Can you tell me something?” George says, almost urgently. 

Dream nods.

He steels himself and asks, “When does this end?”

“What?”

“The time traveling,” George says, almost desperately, “Your immortality ended. So when do I end? When does it stop?” 

Dream shakes his head. “I don’t know.” 

George looks down at the ground, swallows hard, curls and uncurls his hands at his side.

So Dream says, “I know someone who does.” 

While the younger George waits, Dream makes his way back to the bedroom, where _his_ George is still asleep, curled into the spot Dream has left vacant, like the sheets are still warm. When Dream sits back down. George still finds him again, fingers loose against his side, even though he’s dead to the world. 

“George,” Dream whispers, and shakes him, “George, wake up.”

He yawns, makes a sleepy, muffled noise, and blinks up at Dream. “Is it the morning already?”

Dream shakes his head, and George yawns again, pushing himself up to a sitting position and rubbing at his face. “Why did you wake me up? I was having the best dream.”

“Your past is waiting in the living room.”

George raises an eyebrow. “That’s very mysterious.” 

“It’s you,” Dream says, and gestures.

“Me?” George breathes, and Dream sees how everything hits him all at once. 

“He has a question,” Dream says, and then pushes George lightly, “Go and talk to him.” 

George is abruptly, suddenly awake, and he pushes out of bed with an urgency Dream rarely sees. Dream knows that their conversation is likely meant to be private, and so he only ventures out to the living room with George to see the two of them look at each other, like two sides of the same coin, to grab his tea and retreat back to the bedroom. He turns on the lights as he goes; the two of them are already awake, and they likely won’t be going back to sleep. 

He hears snatches of their conversation through the walls, in muted words: 

_It stops when you meet Dream._

_But I’ve already met him. Before._

_When your timelines intersect. Dream goes forward, at all times, while we jump around. At some point, the universe threw us together and things stilled._

_Do you know when?_

The older George takes a moment to think, and then he says, so quietly Dream can barely hear him anymore, _there isn’t a specific time. But you’ll know when._

_How?_

_You’ll feel like you’re at peace._ Quiet. Then: _like you’re at home._

There’s no response, and Dream waits to see if there’s any more words to be exchanged, and notices that his tea has gone cold. He doesn’t think that George will mind much if he interrupts their conversation; after all, they have known each other for millennia. He leaves and goes to reheat his tea, and finds the living room only has one person in it.

“He’s gone?”

George nods. He looks somewhat restless, and Dream wants to offer help, but he doesn’t know what he can do to help. They may overlap, in every way, but there are parts that only belong to George and parts that only belong to Dream. Dream will never get the chance to tell his younger self what he should and shouldn’t do, while George does have that opportunity. 

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” George says, and Dream is inclined to not believe him. At Dream’s cautious look, George amends, “It’s weird. But I’ve had weirder days.”

Neither of them speak for a long moment while Dream reheats his tea. Finally, George breaks the silence.

“I remember having that conversation,” he says. “I remember hearing it when I was younger. I didn’t understand what my older self meant until I said it, just now.”

“Which part?” 

“How much did you hear?”

“Most of it,” Dream says truthfully. “I wasn’t sure whether you wanted me to hear it or not.”

“I don’t mind,” George says. “Did you hear the part about being at home?”

Dream nods. His cheeks are warm. He doesn’t think it’s from the tea.

“It’s true,” George says softly. “It did feel like being at home.” 

“That’s nice,” Dream says.

“Yeah,” George agrees. He looks at Dream, and in the breadth of a second, Dream thinks he would fall in love with him again, over and over, a million times in a million different ways and in a million different timelines. He thinks that he will never run out of ways to love George.

“Should we go back to sleep?” 

George shakes his head. 

Dream agrees with him.

They stay there until the sun rises. 

**Author's Note:**

> please leave kudos or comments if you enjoyed!! im trying out a different style of writing than i usually do, so i would rly love to hear your thoughts on this <3


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